ABSTRACT

The study of English literature is rich in opportunities for developing and applying conceptual understanding. In the new National Curriculum guidance for English at Primary level in England talk of concepts is mostly reserved for grammatical concepts that need to be taught. However some concepts related to the use of literacy for understanding also feature strongly including the concept of a literary theme. One approach to teaching reading for meaning developed by the critic and educationalist I. A. Richards, one of the very first teachers of the then new discipline of English at Cambridge, is to focus on understanding how to use key words, essentially concept-words. His claim was that learning to reason was pretty much the same as learning how to use about 100 key words.